A reimagined music video for four-time Grammy Award winner Kalani Peʻa’s song “Hanalei I Ka Pilimoe” had its world debut at Dances with Films Festival at TCL Chinese Theatres in Hollywood on Friday.
Highlighting the award-winning voice of Pe’a, it features a solo hula dancer who glides into the waters of Hanalei Bay. The entire music video was filmed by moonlight, with no extra lights.
“Everything you see is natural moonlight,” Carolina Espiro, the music video’s director, producer and principal dancer, told Aloha State Daily.
Other talent featured in the music video include Imani Lopaka Colón, the daughter of Lopaka Colón Jr., who plays a younger version of Espiro, and Matthew Jaeger. The associate producer for the music video was Nanea Miyata. The cinematographer was Nathan Haugaard, who previously worked on “Avatar: The Way of Water” (2022), among other projects.
Espiro is no stranger to the big screen. As an actress, she has been featured in television shows, including “Magnum P.I.” and “FBI,” as well as “Rescue: HI-Surf.” Her narrative directorial debut was “The Avon Lady,” an award-winning comedy inspired by her mother’s first job in the U.S.
Even the week of the premiere, the work of a filmmaker does not stop. Yesterday, Espiro started filming her newest short film, “Pilina,” which tells a senior coming of age story and explores how a 70-year-old Chilean seamstress — played by her own mother — joins a hālau and finds sisterhood. The short film is Espiro’s project for the American Film Institute Directing Workshop for Women, a prestigious tuition-free program for emerging filmmakers.
Most of the music video shoot started at midnight and went into the early morning over several days.
“This was rainy season, so it was super cloudy, and you can see all those gorgeous clouds in the footage, but there were times where the clouds would cover the moon,” Espiro said. “And I remembered a chant that my kumu taught me that was what he would call the path clearing chant.”
She used it to ask the clouds to part.
The idea for the music video was born when Espiro, who is part of Hula Hālau Nā Mamo O Panaʻewa in Glendale, California, was asked to do a solo for a hōʻike, or presentation. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, her kumu hula asked her to film the performance. Hula Hālau Nā Mamo O Panaʻewa was established in 2010 by Kumu Hula Chase Keoki Wang and continues the legacies of his kumu hula, which include Kumu Hula Sonny Ching, Kumu Hula Noelani McIntosh and Kumu Hula Kunewa Mook.
Before starting the project, Espiro asked Peʻa for permission to do the video. She also consulted the late Kumu Hula Leināʻala Pavao-Jardin, who died in 2025, on the phone about the project.
“I’ve seen a lot of Hawaiian hula music videos, which are gorgeous,” Espiro said. “I wanted to take it a step further, in that this song particularly talks about the Māhealani moon in Hanalei.”
Long before she filmed this music video, which was shot on Kauaʻi, she had a repeating dream.
“I started having these recurring dreams of this beautiful place in Hawaiʻi at night,” she said. “It was almost like a different planet, and I remember feeling complete peace and belonging, and just almost what you imagine would have felt like to be in heaven — just that complete worry-free, that envelopment of love.”
When Espiro started to shoot the video, she realized she had been dreaming about this moment.
“When I got on that island, and then we went to that beach at night, I just got this flashback of those dreams and that feeling, and I was like ʻOh my gosh, this is it. This is what I was dreaming,’” she said. “I never had the dream again. But that experience was magical in so many ways.”
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Katie Helland can be reached at [email protected].
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